British Prime Minister Theresa May told the U.K. parliament on Monday that it was “highly likely” that Russia was responsible for an attack that has left Sergei Skripal and his daughter critically ill.

Skripal, a one-time Russian military intelligence officer, was an informant for British intelligence services around the turn of the century.

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Skripal and his daughter appear to be have been poisoned using a nerve agent at or near his home in Salisbury, a quiet cathedral city roughly 90 miles southwest of London. May asserted in her Monday statement that the nerve agent used was “military grade” and “of a type developed by Russia.”

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders did not endorse the British government’s de facto position that Russia was responsible for the attack during Monday’s White House briefing.

Sanders did call the attack “an outrage,” “reckless” and “indiscriminate,” but did not offer clarity on whether Trump shares the British assessment of Russian responsibility.

“That’s par for the course,” said retired FBI special agent Frank Montoya Jr. "In terms of any kind of direct criticism of Putin or the Russian government, we don’t see that from this government. … There is always this deflection.”

“It points to the real risks that there are when we disclose sensitive sources. They can literally be in danger,” Rangappa said. “This is real. This is actually life or death.”

A different Russian defector has told a British newspaper, The Mirror, that a secret contact he has in the FSB — the successor to the Soviet-era KGB — told him that he, Skripal and six others were on a Kremlin hit list.

The defector, Boris Karpichkov, said that Christopher Steele, author of a now-famous dossier alleging that the Kremlin held compromising information on President Trump, was among the other names targeted for assassination.

Some intelligence veterans were skeptical of the idea that the Kremlin would really take action against such a high-profile figure as Steele.

“Why would they target Steele when they could target his sub-sources who are still in Russia?” Montoya asked.

The events in Britain come against a backdrop of multiplying elements of the Mueller probe and other controversies involving Russia.

In an interview with Megyn Kelly of NBC News, broadcast on Saturday, Putin suggested that “Jews, just with Russia citizenship” could have been behind the meddling in the 2016 presidential election.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) tweeted over the weekend complaining about Trump being “silent” in response to that remark. “Intolerance is intolerable,” Blumenthal wrote.

Experts questioned whether extradition was really a realistic possibility, however, even if Trump brought diplomatic pressure to bear. The U.S. and Russia have no formal extradition treaty and, as a rule of thumb, nations do not generally extradite citizens unless the alleged deeds are acknowledged as a crime in both jurisdictions.

But the strength of May’s statement in Britain’s House of Commons took some observers by surprise. There had been some expectations that the prime minister would have been less pointed in how she apportioned responsibility.

Instead, she said, there were only "two plausible explanations for what happened.” One was “a direct act by the Russian state against our country” and the other was that the Russian government had “lost control of this potentially catastrophically damaging nerve agent.”

May said that the Russian ambassador had been summoned to explain which of those scenarios had occurred. If his explanations were not considered credible, the British government would consider the poisoning “unlawful use of force by the Russian State against the United Kingdom.”

James Boys, a British historian and an associate professor of international political studies at Richmond University in London, said the strength of that language even left open the possibility of NATO’s commitment to collective defense being activated.

“At what point does this trigger Article Five of NATO — that an attack on one is an attack on all?” he said.

Montoya, the former FBI agent, said Skripal seems to have become collateral damage in a broader conflict.

"The bottom line is there is somebody lying in a hospital bed who might die,” he said. “Has he become a pawn in this global game? It’s almost like the Cold War all over again.”

The Memo is a reported column by Niall Stanage, primarily focused on Donald Trump's presidency.